Lazy knees

Do any of your body parts really need to be taken to task? (If so, I would love to know which ones! :D) For me, it's my knees. I have lazy knees. They perform their basic tasks without complaint. Walking, sitting, hopping, skipping, jumping; all fine. I'm willing to forgive their occasional hiking-downhill treacheries. And while they allow ballet dancing, that's where they're failing me. It's not through any big, obvious means, though. They don't creak or crack. They don't hurt. But they don't try as hard as they could. They don't always straighten completely. Stupid, lazy knees! They're mostly only lazy in arabesque. Which is really too bad. Arabesque is only THE quintessential ballet pose. One that I especially like, and with the exception of that slightly bent knee, one I'm rather good at. (Just in case you need a refresher, an arabesque is when you have one (straight) leg extended to the back.) It's noticeable in adagios, with sustained arabesque balances or penches, but it's especially bad in allegros when the leg is thrown up there. With such force, a slight release of the knee can look almost whip-like.

This is the primary correction that I get from Andrew, the teacher of my Woodland class: that I need to keep that leg straight. He's even gone so far as to say that my tour jetes (I love tour jetes) are wild. But I try! I'm really focusing on straightening my leg, but it's to no avail. Those dratted lazy knees just won't listen!

So I asked Cara if she had any tips for waking up my knees. Any way to strengthen and retrain the muscles involved. She pondered it for a while, and came back with the suggestion that I go down stairs backwards. Ok... Unfortunately, I have no stairs at home. But I do at work! And since my lab is on the 2nd floor and the only bathroom is on the 1st floor of a building with no elevator, I frequently go up and down the stairs! Now I just need to remember to go down them backwards. (I forget about half to two-thirds of the time.) I've been on the backwards-stairs regimen for about a week now (I hope it's helping!), and so far only 1 person has pointed it out and asked me what the heck I'm doing. Which really only confirms my suspicion that everyone at work thinks I'm crazy and therefore considers none of my quirks to be especially unusual or unexpected.